SearXNG: The Search Engine That Puts You in Control

For years, Google has dominated the search engine market, making it seem like there are no alternatives. However, as João Carrasqueira discovered, this lack of choice can come at a cost: data collection and personalized advertising. He recently switched to SearXNG, a metasearch engine that strips private data from queries and stores no personally identifiable information.

SearXNG is not just any search engine; it's a metasearch engine that sends queries to multiple major search engines, including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Qwant. This allows users to have full control over their search experience and choose which search engines can show results in general searches. The service even has 260 built-in search engines, although not all of them are available by default.

One of the key features of SearXNG is its simplicity. Unlike Google's cluttered interface, SearXNG returns a clean list of URLs with thumbnails, and users can switch to specific tabs for images, news, social media, or other topics. This flexibility makes it easy to narrow down results to what you're looking for.

While SearXNG offers the option to self-host the service, there are also multiple public instances available that allow users to access the search engine without any technical knowledge. However, this means that search queries will be sent to a third-party server, which may undermine some of the benefits of using SearXNG in the first place.